Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

04.26.21 The First Steps Back: My Best Bet For Summer School

In a year of massive educational challenges schools now confront the latest new challenge.  How to bring students back to the classroom after a year of reduced learning and social isolation, with dramatically increased inequity. This raises the question: What to do first—over the summer perhaps, even before the new year starts–especially in the area of…


04.13.20 More Thoughts–and Another Video–About Online Read Aloud

Last week Beth Verrilli shared a thought-provoking post about the power of Read Alouds in an online setting. Beth noted how the two videos we shared both helped students to understand how to read a given text independently and also connected them to reading and to the classroom community. I found myself thinking about that when…


04.25.17 Why Reading Aloud to Students is So Critical to Vocabulary

Last night, after reading aloud to my daughter and tucking her in, I was mopping up a bit of work from the day and came across this observation by Isabel Beck: “The source of later vocabulary learning shifts [as students get older] to written texts–what children read [as opposed to what they hear].  The problem is…


02.16.17 Two Clips in Honor of World Read Aloud Day

With thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for the heads up, it turns out that today is World Read Aloud Day, and I am going to make up for the fact that I was not really on-the-ball with Valentine’s Day by being all over World Read Aloud Day.  With good reason. First, a clever Valentines/World Read Aloud Day…